on fashion & storytelling
Fashion Without Borders: Mapping the Transnational Threads of Sartorial Storytelling
organized by: Siobhan Mei, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Clothes, as fashion scholar Tanisha Ford writes, serve as a “powerful social skin”. While the selection of what one wears is linked to taste and trends, clothes can also reflect one’s socioeconomic status, age, physical ability, gender, ethnicity, ancestry, and politics. In this way, clothes often function simultaneously as an assertion of one’s individual self and as a mode of publicly claiming community. Its historical role in the construction of identity situates fashion as unique within the material world and, as this seminar suggests, within literary cultures as well. The relevance of fashion to transnational literary studies is becoming increasingly obvious, particularly as fashion gains traction in the public sphere as a serious form of artistic expression. In particular, the ritual of dress as a narrative mode has emerged as a powerful approach for thinking about how individuals, especially those marginalized within a dominant culture, identify and form communities across (and in spite of) national, linguistic, and socioeconomic boundaries. For example, the conceptualization of the dressed body as narrative is central to the work of scholars such as Carol Tulloch (2008) and Tanisha Ford (2019) who trace the social and political contributions of Black women’s fashion to the formation of Afro-diasporic communities in the Americas and Europe. Non-fiction anthologies such as Women in Clothes (2014) and Worn Stories (2014) also emphasize the capacity of clothes to tell stories of the self. In the narratives in these anthologies, clothes often serve as markers of possibility—material methods for rewriting national definitions of what it means to be beautiful, to be politically visible, and to be human. This seminar seeks papers that explore the transnational possibilities of reading fashion in literature and welcomes topics such as: fashion as a global narrative mode, fashion and/in diasporic literatures, fashion in the archives, the representation of fashion within transnational feminist literatures, fashion as a site of political resistance in literatures of conflict, revolution, or social struggle, fashion and textuality, the role of fashion writing within transnational social movements, and the circulation/transformation of fashion styles or items in translated literatures. Bibliography: Ford, T. (2019). Dressed in Dreams: A Black Girl’s Love Letter to the Power of Fashion. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Heti, S., Julavits, H., & L. Shapton (Eds.). (2014). Women in clothes. New York: Blue Rider Press. Spivack, E. (2014). Worn Stories. Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press. Tulloch, C. (2008). The Birth of Cool: Style Narratives of the African Diaspora. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Friday, March 20, 2020
Stream A (8:30-10:15am)
Gleacher - Koppel Boardroom
"What's Inside?": Disorienting Interiorities & the Handbag
Laura Scroggs, University of Minnesota Twin Cities
Political Involvement Through Sartorial Discourse in Frances de Pontes Peebles’s The Seamstress
Stephanie Saunders, Capital University
Reading Wearable Walls: Rethinking Fashion
Vassiliki Rapti, Boston University
Zenovia Toloudi, Dartmouth College
“Reimagining the Fashion Archive: The Place of the Novel in Transnational Fashion Studies Research”
Jen Sweeney-Risko, Bard Early College-Cleveland
Saturday, March 21, 2020
Stream A (8:30-10:15am)
Gleacher - Koppel Boardroom
Fabricating Truths: Sartorial Self Fashioning and the Legacies of Enslavement
Kimberly Lamm, Duke University
Kimberly Lamm
Sartorial Storytelling: Feminist Translation and the Role of Fashion in Marie Chauvet's 'La Danse sur le volcan'
Siobhan Mei, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Setting the Tone: Slave Imagery in the Nineteenth-Century French Fashion Press
Lise Schreier, Fordham University
The Myth of the Tignon and the Invention of New Orleans
Jonathan Square, Harvard University
organized by: Siobhan Mei, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Clothes, as fashion scholar Tanisha Ford writes, serve as a “powerful social skin”. While the selection of what one wears is linked to taste and trends, clothes can also reflect one’s socioeconomic status, age, physical ability, gender, ethnicity, ancestry, and politics. In this way, clothes often function simultaneously as an assertion of one’s individual self and as a mode of publicly claiming community. Its historical role in the construction of identity situates fashion as unique within the material world and, as this seminar suggests, within literary cultures as well. The relevance of fashion to transnational literary studies is becoming increasingly obvious, particularly as fashion gains traction in the public sphere as a serious form of artistic expression. In particular, the ritual of dress as a narrative mode has emerged as a powerful approach for thinking about how individuals, especially those marginalized within a dominant culture, identify and form communities across (and in spite of) national, linguistic, and socioeconomic boundaries. For example, the conceptualization of the dressed body as narrative is central to the work of scholars such as Carol Tulloch (2008) and Tanisha Ford (2019) who trace the social and political contributions of Black women’s fashion to the formation of Afro-diasporic communities in the Americas and Europe. Non-fiction anthologies such as Women in Clothes (2014) and Worn Stories (2014) also emphasize the capacity of clothes to tell stories of the self. In the narratives in these anthologies, clothes often serve as markers of possibility—material methods for rewriting national definitions of what it means to be beautiful, to be politically visible, and to be human. This seminar seeks papers that explore the transnational possibilities of reading fashion in literature and welcomes topics such as: fashion as a global narrative mode, fashion and/in diasporic literatures, fashion in the archives, the representation of fashion within transnational feminist literatures, fashion as a site of political resistance in literatures of conflict, revolution, or social struggle, fashion and textuality, the role of fashion writing within transnational social movements, and the circulation/transformation of fashion styles or items in translated literatures. Bibliography: Ford, T. (2019). Dressed in Dreams: A Black Girl’s Love Letter to the Power of Fashion. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Heti, S., Julavits, H., & L. Shapton (Eds.). (2014). Women in clothes. New York: Blue Rider Press. Spivack, E. (2014). Worn Stories. Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press. Tulloch, C. (2008). The Birth of Cool: Style Narratives of the African Diaspora. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Friday, March 20, 2020
Stream A (8:30-10:15am)
Gleacher - Koppel Boardroom
"What's Inside?": Disorienting Interiorities & the Handbag
Laura Scroggs, University of Minnesota Twin Cities
Political Involvement Through Sartorial Discourse in Frances de Pontes Peebles’s The Seamstress
Stephanie Saunders, Capital University
Reading Wearable Walls: Rethinking Fashion
Vassiliki Rapti, Boston University
Zenovia Toloudi, Dartmouth College
“Reimagining the Fashion Archive: The Place of the Novel in Transnational Fashion Studies Research”
Jen Sweeney-Risko, Bard Early College-Cleveland
Saturday, March 21, 2020
Stream A (8:30-10:15am)
Gleacher - Koppel Boardroom
Fabricating Truths: Sartorial Self Fashioning and the Legacies of Enslavement
Kimberly Lamm, Duke University
Kimberly Lamm
Sartorial Storytelling: Feminist Translation and the Role of Fashion in Marie Chauvet's 'La Danse sur le volcan'
Siobhan Mei, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Setting the Tone: Slave Imagery in the Nineteenth-Century French Fashion Press
Lise Schreier, Fordham University
The Myth of the Tignon and the Invention of New Orleans
Jonathan Square, Harvard University
